Today’s colleges and universities know that online learning is a must for satisfying the learning demands of a rapidly changing student body. Now, recent market data exposes just how big the business of online learning really is, as well as how much it’s expected to grow in the near future, and which components of online learning are expected to bring in the most revenue.
Online Learning Now
Recent findings detailed in “Digital Learning Compass: Distance Education Enrollment Report 2017 [1],” find that thirty percent of all students in higher education are now taking at least one online course. Those online learners are split almost evenly between students who are exclusively online (14 percent) and those who take some courses in person (16 percent). [Read the full story here “6 million students? Must-know facts about online enrollment. [2]”]
- The numbers reveal a year-to-year online enrollment increase of 226,375 distance education students–a 3.9 percent increase, up over rates recorded the previous two years. More than 6 million students are now online learners, according to the report.
- More than one in four students (29.7 percent) now take at least one distance education course (a total of 6,022,105 students).
- Graduate students are twice as likely to take all of their courses online (26 percent) as undergraduate students (12 percent).
- The number of students studying on a campus has dropped by almost 1 million (931,317) between 2012 and 2015.
- The majority of “exclusively distance” students live in the same state as their institution (55 percent), while 42 percent are studying online at an out-of-state institution.
- Public institutions educate the largest proportion of online students (67.8 percent), though more online learners in private institutions attend nonprofit schools than for-profits, according to the data.
And according to LMS provider Docebo [3], the 2016 world-wide revenue for self-paced online learning products and services (in US$ millions) exceeded $23 million in North America, beating out Europe and even Asia by a large margin.
(Next page: Where online learning is going in the future; infographic)
Online Learning in the Future
Overall growth: In the same market trends report generated by Docebo, the size of the online learning market was estimated to be over USD 165 billion in 2015 and is likely to grow by 5 percent by 2023, exceeding USD 240 billion.
Going corporate: According to the latest market study by Technavio, the size of the global corporate online learning market is predicted to reach an approximate amount of USD 31 billion in revenue by the end of 2020.
An important component: Within online learning, the LMS market is expected to grow at an incredible rate—a CAGR of 24 percent by 2020.
The biggest growth: Within online learning, the cloud is also growing at a tremendous rate. IT spending is steadily shifting from traditional IT offerings to cloud services, and the aggregate amount of cloud is expected to go from $111 billion in 2016 to $216 billion in 2020.
The takeaway for colleges and universities? Not only will online learning dominate the education market, LMS’ that can adapt to online, as well as cloud-based online services, will be critical for maintaining best-of-breed online courses and classes.
For more information on Docebo’s online learning market trends, read the full report here [3].
Infographic:
[4]
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